Summary
A driver picks Elwood up to take him to Nickel Academy. Along the way, they stop and pick up two other boys, both of whom are white: Bill and Franklin. As the car approaches Nickel Academy, Elwood notices how nice it looks; while he was expecting barbed wire and fences, all he sees are expansive green lawns and well-kept buildings. The boys are taken into the superintendent’s office, where Superintendent Spencer (also known as Maynard Spencer) strictly explains to the boys that they should always seek to follow the rules.
Elwood is then taken to pick out his uniform by Blakely, the “house father” of the Cleveland dormitory where Elwood will live. Elwood notices that the uniforms he has to pick from—the ones for black boys—are much more threadbare than the uniforms for white boys. Elwood meets his two roommates, Desmond and Pat. After Blakely leaves, Elwood silently cries to himself and falls asleep, only to later be woken up by a “torrential” mechanical sound that he can’t identify.
The next day, Elwood gets up for his first full day at Nickel Academy. He is shocked by the abysmal living conditions, especially the freezing communal showers. At breakfast he struggles to find a place to sit and eventually ends up sitting next to a boy named Turner, who he ends up befriending. Next to Turner are another three boys, all of whom have rough appearances and intimidate Elwood: Griff, Lonnie, and Black Mike.
Elwood and the rest of the boys go to their first class of the day, math. The boys explain to Elwood that none of them pay attention in class, since grades have nothing to do with when you’re released from Nickel Academy. Instead, everyone focuses on earning “merits” through good behavior and other chores, which allows them to ascend the four ranks the school assigns the boys: Grub, Explorer, Pioneer, and Ace. The lesson turns out to be extremely rudimentary; the majority of the boys at Nickel Academy struggle to read even the most basic material and Elwood feels angered at the quality of the education. After class, he goes to the teacher, Mr. Goodall, and asks if he can take on more advanced material. When he tells the rest of the boys that he spoke with Mr. Goodall, they laugh at him, asking if he really believes “that shit” and implying that nothing will change.
After class, the boys go to art class. Elwood is pulled aside by Blakely and told to go work on the yard with some of the other “Grub” boys. As they’re doing yard work, Elwood attempts to cut grass near a rectangular building that stands between the two schoolhouses (one for white boys and one for black boys) and is ominously warned by another boy not to touch it or go near it “unless they take you.”
Back at the dorm, Elwood vows to get out of Nickel Academy as fast as he can by earning merits and keeping his head down. However, his plan is immediately made more complicated when he stands up for a young boy, Corey, in a fight with Black Mike and Lonnie.
That night, Superintendent Spencer and a houseman named Earl come to take the boys to the ominous building that Elwood had noticed earlier. The black boys call it the “White House,” while the white boys call it the “Ice Cream Factory” because you come out of it with bruises of every color. The shed is used exclusively for brutal beatings. Elwood listens as each of the boys is strapped to a machine that keeps him still while being beaten. Elwood notices that Corey, even though he was the one being bullied, receives a more severe beating than either Black Mike or Lonnie. When it is his turn, Elwood passes out from the intense pain of the beating.
Elwood wakes up in the school hospital, where he is taken care of by Nurse Wilma and Dr. Cooke. Elwood was beaten so badly that the fibers from his jeans became embedded in his legs; it takes Dr. Cooke a day to get them all out. When his grandmother attempts to visit him, she is turned away and told that Elwood can’t have visitors since he is sick. In a flashback, it is revealed that Evelyn and Percy, Elwood’s parents, abandoned him to go out to California after Percy finished his military service.
After a few days, Turner joins Elwood in the hospital. Nonchalantly, he tells Elwood that he has eaten soap powder in order to make himself sick and get out of work. When Elwood asks him why he eats it even if it hurts, Turner tells him that the pain is worth getting out of being at the academy. Elwood reads about the history of Nickel Academy and is horrified to learn that it has been running since 1899, when it used to admit children as young as five. He also learns that the school profits off of the boys’ labor by selling bricks that they make.
During a conversation with Turner while in the hospital, Turner reveals that the “bullying” that Elwood saw between Corey, Black Mike, and Lonnie was actually sexual assault and cynically explaining that in Nickel Academy, people feel free to be as violent as they want because they face no consequences. He tells Elwood that sometimes, boys who are taken to the White House never come back. Elwood tries to protest, exclaiming that what is happening is against the law, but Turner just tells him that nothing will work “in here” to stop the abuse. Elwood decides to keep his injuries a secret from his grandmother and returns to school, now accepted as one of the boys due to having received a harsh beating.
Analysis
Part II reveals the horrors that lie beneath Nickel Academy’s facade. As Elwood drives up to the school, he notices its seemingly pleasant appearance—an appearance that is quickly shattered as Elwood witnesses extreme violence, abuse, and racism within the school’s confines. His first time looking at the school metaphorically foreshadows Nickel Academy’s dark dualism. To the outside world, the school appears presentable, just like it appears peaceful when Elwood first looks at it from the outside. However, this peace is only a facade; once he is inside, Elwood experiences and sees first-hand just how horrifying the circumstances within the school are.
Within Nickel Academy, corruption of the school’s upper administration, like Superintendent Spencer, erodes any possibility for escape. Even though he is supposed to take care of the boys and ensure their safety, it is Superintendent Spencer who comes during the night and takes the boys to the White House in order to beat them. The extent of the beatings is unfathomably extreme; when Turner mentions that some boys never returned, it is implied that they are beaten to death. Elwood himself is beaten so badly that his jeans become embedded in his skin. Likewise, he also experiences Nickel Academy’s secrecy and pattern of covering up its abuse when his grandmother, Harriet, is banned from seeing him and told that he is simply “sick.”
Elwood quickly becomes an outsider at Nickel Academy, partially due to his desire to do what is "right" or seek justice. Nickel Academy, like the world around it, remains a highly segregated space. The same patterns that Elwood experienced in Tallahassee occur within Nickel Academy. The black boys receive inferior materials, threadbare suits, and are treated more harshly than the white boys. Nurse Wilma treats Elwood with disgust just because of his skin color. Elwood is also more educated than the other boys. Many of them struggle to read at a first-grade level, which leads to Elwood’s frustration over the unfair circumstances of his conviction. He, unlike the boys, was supposed to be taking college classes and has no real criminal record. Until he is beaten, the boys reject him; once he experiences physical violence at the hands of the school, they accept him as one of their own.
Skin color is not the only hierarchy present at Nickel Academy; instead of grades or academic achievement, Nickel Academy is based on a system of arbitrary “merits” that assign the boys to a certain level: Grub, Explorer, Pioneer, and Ace. The system allows the school to create a “justice” system that is wholly idiosyncratic and malleable. Because there are no real rules for how merits can be earned, they can be manipulated in order to punish the boys and keep them at the school for an arbitrary period of time. As Elwood discovers, Nickel Academy profits off of the boys’ labor; therefore, it’s more profitable for the school to keep boys there for as long as possible, never allowing them to graduate and instead trapping them within its exploitative abuse.
Beyond its exploitation of the boys for their labor, Nickel Academy is rendered even more sinister by the sexual and physical abuse that occurs both between the students and from the administrators. Throughout the first chapters of Part II, Elwood undergoes a stark process of realization as he witnesses this abuse unfold before him. At Nickel Academy, Elwood quickly comes to understand, what is on the surface cannot be trusted. The shed hides the vicious site where boys are beaten in the night; fights, like the one he attempts to stop between Black Mike, Lonnie, and Corey, are actually acts of sexual assault.
While most of the boys appear to accept the horrors present at Nickel Academy, Elwood begins to show signs of wanting to somehow push back against the school’s conditions. His education allows him to read about the school’s history, and he becomes one of the only boys to realize how dark the real history of the reformatory is. He tells Turner that his family has a lawyer who could help them—a statement to which Turner responds with cynicism and disbelief. Turner acts as a foil (an opposite) to Elwood. Elwood retains idealistic beliefs of somehow changing his circumstances, believing that justice is possible; Turner, on the other hand, tells Elwood how misguided he is and how little Elwood understands about the true nature of Nickel Academy. For Turner, Nickel Academy serves as a representation of the real world and true human nature: lawless, violent, cruel, and senseless.
